Monday, 11 February 2013

VMware Workstation – Cannot Assign Available PCI Slot

An interesting little
problem when I decided to add additional Network Adapters to a Virtual Machine
in VMware Workstation.

The Virtual Machine had no problem starting with the original hardware as
below.

Image: Original Hardware

But when I added two more virtual Network Adapters, on powering on the VM,
received this error “Cannot assign available PCI slot to …. There are no more
PCI slots available in the virtual machine. Please remove some devices ….”

Image: No more PCI slots
error

The fix was to edit the VM_NAME.vmx
file (check ‘Virtual Machine Settings
> Options tab > Working directory’ for location) and add the lines –

pciBridge0.present = "TRUE"

pciBridge0.pciSlotNumber = "16"

Note: If you’re having
problems, try typing out the above – sometimes the formatting's out if you copy and paste!

– before the line scsi0.pciSlotNumber
= “16”, and then increment all the pre-existing pciSlotNumber entries by 1
(so they are consecutively numbered) like in the image below.